I heard a great explanation of an BT from Tom Martino, the Troubleshooter (on the radio.)

BT’s
promise that you can sit back and reap profits from the work of others you’ve recruited into the system. But by their very nature, BT’s attract the type of people who want to sit back and reap rewards from the work of others.
You won’t be able to reap rewards from people who don’t work.

PART 2: The
same percentages of people make it big in BT as make it in mainstream jobs.

a retired Nu Skin Blue Diamond who supposedly made $15 million in network marketing. The main flagship product, Bio-Choice, appears to have some decent science behind it. But I’m not qualified to judge. You’d have to download the medical studies from their web site and get a qualified doctor to tell you whether loading mother hens with certain biological substances would truly create the auto-immune reaction products in their eggs or not.
Jim Alford, a long-time friend of Charles Givens and an acquaintance of mine, gave me this “Success Plan” when he approached me about joining the Legacy for Life team:

Bio-Choice Success Plan
1. Order $325 Business System
2. Order 100 tapes for $25 plus tax and shipping
3. Share advertisements in USA Today for $40 per week
4. Follow up calls to leads and three way calls with Jim Alford
5. Keep it simple
6. Thursday
conference calls and Saturday morning training

Supposedly, this would generate the leads needed to build an organization quickly and get a decent income stream going. I remained skeptical and did not even bother trying the product, choosing instead to rely on cheap vitamins from The Vitamin Shoppe.

Before you do anything else, compare the benefits of the retail products to those available from much cheaper sources. Ask yourself whether you’d be willing to pay retail price for the products’ benefits, and whether anyone else would. You may have to try the retail products for a couple of months to see if they deliver their promised benefits.
Better to be a customer first than jump into some “business opportunity” that may not be worth a damn.

It’s not been that long since I was posting an almost identical post. When dh protested them screwing up his checks there were very rude and told him that he should live on a budget, that because if he did it wouldn’t be a problem for him! EXCUSE ME! Seriously, how many charge cards are in their wallets because there are ZERO in mine. He politely told them that it was BECAUSE we lived on a well balanced zero based budget that their screw up did affect us so deeply. I live on a budget and you do too. I wish I could give you some sage words of advice on dealing with it. All we could do was to keep on HR’s butt about it and remain cool—after all we do still need the job!

For the second time in a row, my husband’s work has messed up on his paycheck. This time they shorted him two hours. They act like messing up paychecks is not a big deal. Really?! I bet if it was their check they’d be worked their butts off to solve this problem.

My plan was to start funding out new Roth IRA with this paycheck, but that can’t happen now. Couldn’t have come at a worse time.

We’ve been doing Financial Peace Jr with our son, and we decided to budget for and purchase the kit for it. My niece is visiting for the week, so I made a horrible photocopy of my son’s chore chart, and we did chores through the week, and today we went to the dollar store. She loved it!
Her family is pretty horrible with money, and she fights doing chores. I’ve tried to get my brother to do FPU or even read the book, but while he’s vaguely interested, his wife is not. I’ve tried to find any way to get the stuff into their house.
So now my niece is excited to do chores, and has asked to have all the exact same stuff my son does so they can match! (She’s five. It’s SO COOL to match.) My brother heard about it and asked me straight out if she could get some of the stuff to bring home.
So I went out to get her one. NO ONE has it. And apparently they re-did the whole thing and nothing looks like the set my son has. They’ve even gone so far as to remove listings of the old version from half.com and ebay and amazon used so I can’t find it online.
SO, here’s my question: Do any of you know where I can get a copy of the box set of FP Jr. in the previous (2003?) version? Anyone know anyone who tried it and doesn’t want it? (And please don’t encourage me to make my own; the point here is that matching my son’s set is a motivator.)

By keeping his program very simple and very very strict, he is able to provide a lot of moral support to folks who have trouble sticking to a plan. But at the same time this rigidity gives him very limited ability to fine-tune the plan for specific circumstances (although occasionally on the show he bends a wee bit) and he seems to be unable to ever admit that he’s wrong, at least not in the last two decades. And I agree that sometimes he is harsh with callers, to the point that I sometimes think he’s missed the point of the caller’s question.

The Motley Fool folks are completely right that planning for 12% growth is unrealistic. Warren Buffet puts the figure closer to 7%, and the closer you are to retirement the less likely you are to see double-digit growth. And of course there’s an element of luck – in hindsight it’s easy to pick the highest-growth mutual funds but looking forward, all you can do is pick funds with a good track record. I would definitely not stop saving as soon as a 12% growth rate would cover my retirement! (not that I’m getting even there, yet)

On the plus side, *nobody* says to *stop* saving for retirement, so that’s where all the plans come together.

but I’ll admit that I was shocked the first time that I heard his show. I don’t like the way that he talks to some of his callers. That kind of language and talking to others is not allowed in my house so I don’t listen to his show. But, I’m not one to throw out the baby with the bath water.

He first texted them to me, but my little smartphone is so dinky that I could barely see them. I had to ask him to send them to me at my email address, and he sort of balked at that (since that would constitute him sending them twice). But he did send them. That was the beginning of “this guy is a little hard to work with.”

Driving over presents all sorts of logistical difficulties, which we’re debating. In the “pro’s” column, it would give me a chance to check the thing out in person, and pay in person if I like what I see. But in the “con’s” section, I’d be driving out there alone, in a truck which has had a number of breakdowns in the last year. Furthermore I’d be driving out to some old dusty ranch by myself, with just him and his gentleman’s honor that he’s not going to take advantage of the situation. Hate to put it in those terms, but let’s say other ladies in similar situations have regretted the assumption than nothing would go wrong. I could always go armed but that presents its own new set of pro’s and con’s. I’m just not sure I really feel comfortable with a trip like that. Let alone the logistics of my absence here for an overnight stay. Hence the motivation to find a way to do this remotely.

We’re going to make a price offer here in the next few days. We’ll see if we can even get past that point. He’s already said some things to indicate he will be tough to negotiate with. So it might all be a moot point if we can’t agree on a price. But assuming we do, I’ll tell him I’d like to make payment in X manner, and see what he says to that. After all, I’m trying to give him money for a piece of equipment which isn’t really in high demand. I can always say “never mind” and let him sweat out how much he wants that money. Make him step up a little.

but that you should do research on mutual funds with long track records. Well, at some point 40 years ago doesn’t matter. What you really need to do is compare a fund to the S&P 500 or other index and see if it did better or worse. Then again, we don’t know what the future holds, so really, to me, do index funds since they are cheap. That way you keep your expenses down. Dave never really talks about the expense ratio of a mutual fund.

but when we took FPU back in 2011, it was Salivan who inspired us. I guess we knew if he could overcome backruptcy, we could overcome our relatively small amount of debt, though it felt big to us at the moment. It wasn’t someone who worked for Salivan that inspired us. Plus if it wasn’t for Salivan, I’d have never heard of any of the speakers he has now anyway. Others have the same/similar message … hate debt, get rid of it, never use it again, tell your $$ what to do, etc. I had heard of others back then using this message, but it was Salivan who inspired us.
Same here. I may be taking his statement on this wrong, but to me it sounds like he is saying that in all economies we should expect 12% on just about any mutual fund. Dh & I do have some performing at that level but would like them all to be at that level. I just looked over ours and some of the returns look pitiful. It seems soem changes need to be made.